Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Henry Kissinger put the novel’s title into practice in his work as the most famous diplomat of his time.
Admired and reviled. Loved and hated. These are the feelings collected by his obituaries, after he died on Wednesday at his home in Kent, Connecticut. He was 100 years old.
His polarizing figure, in a highly polarized society, was starkly expressed in the media. “Henry Kissinger, war criminal admired by the ruling class of the United States, has died”, headlined Spencer Ackerman in his farewell article in Rolling Stone. Don’t forget that Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for seeking an end to the conflict in Vietnam, a decision so controversial that the other laureate, Le Duc Tho, a North Vietnamese military and politician, declined the honor.
Who else but Fox, in which the silence of Joe Biden was underlined several hours after the death of the man who advised twelve presidents, went out in a frenzy amplifying the criticism of this magazine. “They should be ashamed of themselves,” replied Tudor Dixon, former Republican candidate for governor of Michigan. There were other conservative voices who cried out to heaven for that attack on one of their eminences.
Rarely has the death of a figure of this magnitude prompted so much praise (Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed grief for a friend and Russia’s Putin praised his “pragmatism”) and, in turn, allowed the emergence of task of demolishing his legacy. Even Ben Rhodes, adviser to President Barack Obama, called him a “hypocrite” in an article in The New York Times.
Kissinger, who made his last name synonymous with diplomacy in the best sense and also in the worst (that of brutality in pursuit of results), influential and controversial, forger of alliances and accomplice of dictatorships, praised for his vision and accused of war crimes, a powerful figure with opinions that competed with those of the presidents; all this and more was this man of lights and shadows very long around the whole planet.
He is considered the exponent of realpolitik who served as the engineer of the opening between the United States and China, the negotiator of the exit from the Vietnam War and the strategist who resorted to cunning, the ambition and intellect to remake the United States’ power relationship with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values ??in pursuit of its goals.
In turn, their encouragement in the bloodbaths of the military coups of Chile, Argentina and Pakistan is also documented or, among other perversions, their role in the bombings of Cambodia and Laos in 1969 and 1970. Few have have been praised and vilified with as much passion as he was, the second-in-command of the government who came to have more global fame than his boss.
A survivor of the Holocaust, Kissinger obtained refuge after fleeing Nazi Germany (in 1938, aged 15). He started as a professor at Harvard in the fifties and climbed to the top of the US political establishment. He made the leap from academia and was both an undisputed landmark of diplomacy and a master of manipulation, and even a pop culture icon.
There was no “peace with honor”, as he said in 1973 when he declared the end of hostilities in the jungles of Indochina. Almost two years later, with Gerald Ford in the White House, the Viet Cong conquered Saigon. On the contrary, Kissinger was accused of failing to reach a similar agreement years earlier and prevent more deaths, while he tried to prolong the war knowing, as is well known, that the chances of winning were non-existent.
But, just as he survived the Holocaust, he came out of that military disaster and was unscathed by the Watergate scandal that brought President Richard Nixon to an end.
He served as secretary of state and national security adviser under two Republican presidents (Nixon and Ford), as well as a powerful adviser to political leaders in both major parties in the United States.
“He really set the benchmark for all those who followed him in this job,” said Antony Blinken, current heir to the head of the State Department. “I have had the privilege of having his advice numerous times, the last one a month ago”, he confessed. “He made numerous decisions that changed history and helped manage their implications,” he stressed.
In South America, where he left a few notches, he is remembered as a key figure who helped bloody military coups to stop the spread of communism. He is credited with the architecture to eliminate the Chilean president Salvador Allende. “A man has died with a historical brilliance who never managed to hide his deep moral misery,” wrote Juan Gabriel Valdés, ambassador of Chile to the United States, on X (formerly Twitter). His message was retweeted by President Gabriel Boric.
History has judged some of his Cold War exercises in realism in a harsher light than was generally done during his time. With that eye on the competition between great powers, he was often willing to be cruelly Machiavellian, especially when dealing with “second-tier” nations, which he frequently viewed as pawns in the great battle.
Although always happy to respond to his critics, this time Kissinger is silent.